Design and Analysis of a Respiratory Sound Simulator for Testing Chest Auscultation Stethoscopes

There are many different kinds of auscultation transducers today such as mechanical and electronic stethoscopes, accelerometers, and microphones. However, testing these devices on human subjects is a difficult test since their lung sounds vary with time, and they are not always available in lab environments. To resolve these problems, a respiratory sounds simulator was designed that produces stable and repeatable lung sounds to be employed for making comparisons of different auscultation transducers. Frequency response evaluation of the device was done using white-noise input and distortion analysis was done using vesicular breath sound and heartbeat inputs. Finally, I included an exemplary testing, ‘obtaining the transfer function of an electronic stethoscope’.